The next version of the EOL API will include counts of subtaxa, among other things, so I'm tinkering with VoLE to display these counts as node area.

I may leave it in as an option, but scaling the area linearly with number of subtaxa is not going to be very usable:

And the logarithm of the number of subtaxa doesn't seem to do justice to the larger groups:

http://web.mit.edu/press/2009/visual-systems.html
http://scitedaily.com/building-3d-models-on-the-fly-using-a-webcam/
http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2010/01/21/realism_in_ui_design/

Also very cool: A visualization of the evolution of On the Origin of Species.

Biodiversity of the Day: A half-pony/half-monkey monster
(Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?)

HTML5 has a bunch of new features, but the spec won't become an official "W3C Recommendation" until about 2022 or so. A lot of the features of the specification, however, are already being implemented in browsers. "Which features, and in which browsers?", you ask? That's where the Modernizr library comes in.

I just put together a quick single-purpose drupal site for one of the researchers here at BioSynC (Torsten Dikow), and thought I'd do a walkthrough of that project here.

The objective:

He had a database of specimen data that he wanted to put up on a drupal site with a filterable google map showing where the specimens were collected.

Modules used:

For the import, I used the Node Import module and had Torsten send me a CSV file exported from his database. (Any delimited flat text file would work.) And for the mapping, I used the GMap module and Location module.

Click through to the full post for the end result and the step-by-step instructions.

Miscellany. Click through to be info-tained.

Reading about Go, a new systems programming language from the good people at Google.
http://golang.org/
Tech Talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKnDgT73v8s&feature=youtube_gdata

Looking at drupal modules to add a map of synthesis meetings to the web site:
http://drupal.org/project/gmap
http://drupal.org/project/location

Reading more about some HTML5 features (canvas, inline SVG, DOM storage and web workers).

http://themannahattaproject.org/

Just submitted some code to allow PhyloWidget to get EOL Images, and currently working on getting it to load the EOL classification tree. Here are some screen shots of the two working together, showing the EOL primates tree and images:

And the biodiversity of the day is: birds.

Programming in the public sandbox areas of Second Life turned out to be pretty painful, so I started with a Processing sketch. It creates a random tree and draws it using the algorithm of Botanical Visualization of Huge Hierarchies section 3.1.